monolake - Ghosts

**Includes the full album on a bonus CD** Big new album from Robert Henke, putting aside the autumnal ambient shades of his recent work in favour of his darkest, most dancefloor-friendly release in ages. The title track, which also opens the album, sets the punchy tone, and finds the German reconnecting with his junglist roots, creating a sub-heavy roller that feels like a more supple, sophisticated update of late 90s techstep. Recorded and mixed entirely in - of course - Ableton live, the album's sound world is richly detailed, full of manipulated recordings of vintage cymbals and hi-hats, metal plates, singing bowls, bells and Henke's own voice. But these disparate elements aren't left to their own devices, oh no; they're focussed into truly tendon-tightening rhythmic structures - see 'Afterglow' and 'Aligning The Daemon', which sound like the music Peverelist has always dreamed of making, the spectral rave shapes of 'Hitting The Surface' and the scuffed steppage of 'The Existence Of Time', which shares the same as DNA as the work of Henke's sometime collaborator T++. We never expect anything less than excellence from Monolake, but there really is renewed energy and exuberance to the project evident in these tracks - the d'n'b brutalism of 'Lilith', for instance, just has to be heard to be believed. Such an immense pleasure to witness an advanced rhythm technicians letting rip.